This invention relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly to networking devices in a home over phone lines.
Home Phoneline Network Alliance (HomePNA) standards 1.0 and 2.0, incorporated herein by reference, have become the dominant solutions for home networking. These standards utilize the existing phone line wires in the homes. HomePNA 1.0 provides a throughput of 1 Mbps, while HomePNA 2.0xc3x97 typically provides 10 Mbps, or up to 16 Mbps in good channels, and optionally up to 32 Mbps, which is comparable to Ethernet 10BaseT. However, the ever-growing needs for higher throughput and quality of service (QoS) call for the definition of an improved standard.
The present invention achieves technical advantages by providing improved physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layers to increase the performance of home phone line networks. The PHY improvements include numerous higher symbol rates, higher constellations, variable power level, error correcting codes, byte interleaving, inter-symbol-interference (ISI)-free pulse shape and pre-equalization. The MAC improvements include managed bandwidth resources allocation, guaranteed quality of service for latency sensitive applications, solicited grants, support to devices with low power consumption and support to device with low processing power.
Some of the advantages of the present improved home networking system include utilizing extended spectral bands, increased transmission power and others. The present home networking system is especially suitable for homes where the phone wires are isolated from the public network, which allows relaxation of restrictions. The above features provide a significant improvement in the home network throughput, robustness and QoS. Therefore, it allows home phone line networks to support applications that require higher throughput and better QoS, such as audio, video, games, client/server, distributed computing and future applications.